Things you didn’t know about Canada

Did you know that the province of Ontario is almost 1.5 times larger than Texas? I didn’t think so. UPDATE: AAARGH! apparently THOUGH I STILL DON’T GET WHY NOT this doesn’t mean the same thing as “almost 50 percent bigger than.” Everybody including Matty B. has been on me about this. I was trying to say what they said. AARGH.

Since I have a Canadian in my life (conveniently known as The Canadian) I can completely vouch for even the weirder items mentioned in this tumblr. Yes, they say “PASS-ta” instead of “POSSta” Yes, they hang the toilet paper the wrong way. (Up until now I had thought this was a personal quirk, not a national blight.) Yes, they have an irrational aversion to the microwave.

I am confused by a few things, however. I grew up on the south side of Lake Ontario and we had “marks” in school. That doesn’t seem odd at all. We had “slivers” too.

Do you have any favorite Canadianisms? (Don’t even get me started on how they speak French.)

Kyrie, anything associated with food, the French do very well. Everytime we leave France, I stuff the baggage with packages of those HUGE 3-ply serviettes. They are light and great at protecting breakable stuff inside, (and the best napkins available).

Canada is so clean! Just look at the U.S. side at the falls & then go over to the Canadian side and compare. It is embarressing how much junkier our side is. Niagra-on-the-Lake is one of our favorite places.

There have been several mentions about wars involving Canada. Is it true that the reason the folks in Minnesota elected Jessie Ventura was there was imminent threat they would be invaded & taken over by those pesky Manatobans? Folks in Minnesota say it worked. Canadians swear that the scheme worked only because they passed on annexing any place where the folks were foolish enough to elect a WWF “star” to public office.

Our oldest, now 42 was on the cover of some tourist literature by the Quebec Tourism folks when he was 4 years old.

Canadians love Canadian products. They push the Canadian content in every commercial (or so it seems). Hamburgers the way Canadians like them, bags of potato chips with the maple leaf on them, you name it.

I jokingly told a Canadian friend that his homeland suffered from “Little Brother Syndrome.” He initially got mad, then stopped, thought for a moment, and said, “Maybe.”

Yup. Did that in Spain in ’77, when the “stereotype” of the obese American tourist in Budweiser shirt and black socks with sandals – who is convinced those damn foreigners will admit they speak English if you yell loud enough – was on every corner.

I was in the paper business for 30 years. What is the Canadian take on hanging a roll of B/T?
BTW, did you know that Canada is the root cause of the paper shortage that spred like wildfire across the US in the early/mid 70′s?

The proper way is to hang B/T is with the dangly part in front. Back when colors & prints were available, most two-ply tissues had a plain white bottom sheet. By hanging it dangling in front, the print/color was showing. But the real answer is whatever the user wants. I’m an in front guy, my wife the opposite. Thank goodness for 4 bathrooms.

Many decades ago, not long after I graduated from A&M, my brother met and came to know a young nurse from Canada who was working here. In the course of time he told her some Aggie jokes and disclosed that his older brother (me) had spent four years at Aggieland. She recognized his Aggie jokes as very much like the Newfie jokes she’d grown up with, and for some time she thought Aggieland was — like Newfoundland — a geographic area distinct from Texas. Truth to tell, she may have been right, or so my UT friends might say.

Hey,Paul, Thanks for the “larger than/as large comment. That’s one of my things too and was going to post until I saw yours.

Back in the early nineties, I landed at the airport in Edmonton and approached a newspaper box to by a daily paper. I was puzzled to see a small sign above the coin slot saying “Loons Only”. I wondered if the paper was only for crazy people until I learned that “loon” or “loonie” was the Canadian one-dollar coin bearing the image of a loon (the bird)

Back when I was in college, a friend from Florida did a semester in England. Every time she met new people, they would ask her if she was Canadian and she would answer, “No, I’m American.”

After this happened the umpteenth time, she asked her new friends why people kept asking this; was she giving off some Canadian vibe or something?

They said no, if you ask a Canadian if they’re an American you get a 30-minute lecture about the differences between the two countries. But if you ask an American if they’re Canadian they just say, “No, I’m American.” We just want to make small talk about where you’re from!

Did some work in N. Dakota and the locals had their share of Canadian jokes. One I remember was the best way to find out if someone is from Canada is to ask them to spell the name of the country. If Canadian, he will answer, “Cee – eh – eN – eh – Dee – eh”. (Works better orally when you can emphasis the “eh”.)

I had a conflict that kept me from going to a meeting in Calgary. The next week I got a call from a guy with another company who did attend. I asked how the trip went and he answered, “The weather was great and there were prostitutes out everywhere.” Still one of the strangest responses I’ve ever gotten to such an innocent question.

Funny you guys talking about the parking meters. That’s a BC thing. Even other Canadians call it “Bring Cash”. It’s not like that anywhere else that I’ve been. As for the health care thing, like I tell Canadians who complain about the US,until you’ve lived in it, you don’t really know what you’re talking about. I’ve been here 10 years, in my late 50′s, and use it as much as any other 50+ year old. It works fine and doesn’t cost me 20% of my gross income. I was uninsured in 2005, a CAT scan in Edmonton cost CA$1,000 and a CAT scan in Huntsville, Alabama a week later cost US$3,000.

Once while waiting to begin sitting through an excruciatingly tense senior board meeting one of our members proudly revealed that he was from Canada. I jokingly remarked, “When are you going to get that country up and running?”

Good for a laugh. But then when the meeting head arrived – a legendarily ill-tempered egotist – one of the group told me to repeat what I’d said about Canada. Turned out the chair head was Canadian. Suddenly wasn’t as cool as I had lead myself to believe. Had to explain I had relatives from the wonderfully wooded Edens of beautiful Quebec.

Like many draftable boys growing up in the sixties, our parents had plans to send us up there if needed. Beat fighting a war over who controls a lost jungle across the ocean.

I really don’t mean to haunt this topic (and I’m not stalking anyone) but from the link in Kyrie’s original comment:

Canadians (and Brits, iirc) say “she is in hospital” while we say “in the hospital”. Would the flip side to that be saying “she is in college” vs. “she is in the college”. Saying “in the college” sounds clumsy, so why do we think it’s ok to say “in the hospital”? Just wondering. Maybe it’s just what our ear is used to hearing.

Also, music, The Tragically Hip. Sell out up north; unheard of here. Tragic.

Not sure why there is no article before “college”, but I think most people from England, and probably other countries, say university, not college. For example, “She went off to university”, or “I’m starting university next week”.

We have wonderful memories of Eastern Canada, having been there over a dozen times. Once as we were leaving our hotel in Halifax, the clerk told us to be careful as Halifax was much more dangerous than most of Canada. “Why we had almost a dozen murders here in the past year.” I thanked the man but thought to myself, we have C-Stores back home that can match that.
You are correct about the Canadian flag on your backpack. Years ago, I flew out of Montreal a number of times on my way to certain places where Americans were not welcome.

Not to beat a dead horse (dead 199 years, by the way) but the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812 The Treaty of Ghent (8 Stat. 218), signed on 24 December 1814, in Ghent (modern-day Belgium), was the peace treaty that ended the War of 1812 restored relations between the two nations to status quo ante bellum.

So I suppose if you call a draw a loss, we lost. But then again, so did they. (“they” being the UK. Canada wasn’t a country. They didn’t even have a flag until 1965, for goodness sakes!)

Not to beat a dead horse (dead 199 years, by the way) but the Treaty of Ghent, restored relations between the two nations to status quo ante bellum. Which means that everything went back to the way they were before the war. Neither party gained or lost territory.

So I suppose if you call a draw a loss, we lost. But then again, so did they. (“they” being the UK. Canada wasn’t a country. They didn’t even have a flag until 1965, for goodness sakes!)

Fun read and fond memories. I grew up west of Canada (!). When I entered the Air Force a security clearance was required for the task I was to perform. Agents interviewed friends and neighbors, including one friend of the family who did not suffer simpletons long nor quietly. They asked Jean if I had ever been out of the country. She looked at them and pointed out the front door, saying: “See that? That’s Canada. We shop there, go bowling (duckpins!) and swimming there (the beaches were less stony on that side of the lake). Hell yes he’s been out of the country. They shut up and left. I heard this story later from my parents and had quiet a laugh.

A single DUI conviction is not grounds to deny entry into the U.S; however, multiple DUI convictions or a DUI conviction in combination with other misdemeanor offenses can make a person inadmissible and require a waiver prior to entering the United States.

About half the stuff you’ve mentioned are Eastern Canadianisms. I’ve lived in Alberta 10 years and it’s been quite fun. My “Canadian” won’t visit Texas between the first of June and the first of October. She says she’ll melt.